Here’s how the Kansas City Chiefs will spend their postseason bye week
Chiefs players filed into the practice facility Monday, some for regeneration and recovery, others for meetings. At the completion of their work, they received a blunt message from coaches.
Go home. Take some time off.
A bye week has offered the Chiefs advancement into the postseason’s second round and a game at Arrowhead Stadium with a trip to the AFC Championship on the line. And it’s provided the freedom of a couple of days away from football. They will handle the week off in a similar manner in which they approached last year’s bye.
That starts with keeping the players off the practice field Tuesday and Wednesday. When they return Thursday, they arrive in a unique situation — preparing for a game in which they don’t know the team they will play. The practices will adjust accordingly.
“The guys’ fundamentals will be a huge part of it,” Chiefs coach Andy Reid said. “We’ll actually put on the pads and work fundamentals. Then it gives us an opportunity for the ones to work against the ones and get in some work there. Short and sweet, but it gives the guys the opportunity to get some good fundamental work in, which you need to re-tool as you get to the end here. We’ll do that.”
As the weekend approaches, the Chiefs will be spectators. They have three possible opponents for the AFC Divisional round — the Patriots, Texans or Bills.
“I’ll probably be at my house watching those games,” Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said. “I’ll invite the guys, and if they want to come over, they can come.”
The preparation for all three teams trickles in throughout the week, but the benefit of a bye week — earned when the Patriots lost to the Dolphins on Sunday, moving the Chiefs into the AFC’s No. 2 seed — is it allows Kansas City to focus inward.
Just as they did during their regular season bye, the Chiefs plan to self-scout and, as Reid pointed out, tweak their own fundamentals. Mahomes, for example, has trained hard on his footwork late in the season, particularly hitching up in the pocket. The work there remains the same, regardless of next weekend’s opponent. Kansas City will host the Divisional round matchup at 2:05 p.m. Jan. 12.
“I think the biggest thing about this week is making sure you’re fundamentally at the right point,” Mahomes said. “As the seasons go on, you start losing some fundamentals there at the end. So we kind of go back and look at ourselves and the fundamentals and prepare ourselves. So that whoever we get to play, we’re ready with how we prepared ourselves.”
Coaches will be assigned to scouting, but the bulk of those assignments will come after the revelation of the opponent, Reid said. The Chiefs have already played two of the three possibilities, which tweaks that equation.
“We know a couple of them; we know Houston and New England. The one team that we don’t know is Buffalo,” Reid said. “... But we’ll go back and look at all of them and make sure that we have a pretty good grasp on all of them. Then as the games go on this Saturday, we’ll kind of finalize it. We have the players coming in on Sunday just for a quick blast. We’ll at least have a heads up on who we play and what direction we need to go there.”